That is certainly a puzzle since it looked successfully for some items in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/scipy/linalg.
Is flapack.so the only shared library there? Do other shared libraries that you are able to load also have that name convention?
You might try adding that folder to your PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH as an experiment.

The only difference between this path and the path for command line python is the '/home/aluchko/nrn-importer/share/nrn/lib/python' at the end. If I set the two paths to be equal the neuron python still has the same issues.

Since I'm unable to reproduce the problem, I'm afraid I don't have any further suggestions except to verify if you can import anything that involves a .so file in your
/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/... folders.